There has been an increasing trend in the use of portable consumer devices capable of communicating with other devices so as to form a network of devices. Such communication is typically performed using known wireless protocols (e.g. WiFi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee). A similar trend can be observed with lighting devices, such as LEDs and lighting displays, which are increasingly becoming connectable to such networks. These devices are typically able to create their own network and/or connect to an existing network so as to form a lighting network.
It will be apparent that reliability of such a lighting network is increasingly important. If, for example, a message for a particular device in the network is not correctly received by the device, this may lead to confusion for a user of the device and erroneous behaviour of the network.
WO 2008/084414 describes a network communication system in which a network device communicates with a co-ordinator. In an embodiment, the system is adapted to increase a counter to indicate a number of times the network device has not responded. The counter value may be compared to a ‘predefined threshold’ to determine a status of the network device.
US 2006/084479 describes a method for displaying information items related to a network. The method comprises outputting one of information relating to the activation status of the network and information relating to the amount of data being transmitted and received.